I released the first set of RPI and ISR results
for this year this week. The start date is a compromise of sorts between
those who would like full listings for every team before they actually
begin play and those like me who would prefer to wait a couple more weeks
until they actually mean something. In the absence of actual meaning
there, I wanted to take a look at something to see if I could find out how
much early season results might mean. Now, I've studied this a couple of
different ways before, but what I want to look at is the best starts in
recent history and see how the teams ended up the year to see how much it's
worth to get out of the gate really fast.

One of the problems with the game is the lack of a sense of history and
accompanying lack of data to analyze, but we at least have the last seven
years to work with now, so I thought I'd see what the five best ten-game
starts were since 1997. Now, just looking at who looks the best after
everyone plays ten games isn't all that informative (it's the equivalent
of complaining about the RPI's in early March, for all those Albany
disparagers out there), so what I did was take the end-of-season ISR's
and measure the first ten games of each team's season. Here are the five
best:

#5. Clemson, 2002. This was, overall, a very good team, and they
started with a serious push, sweeping three over Auburn and two over South
Carolina along with a couple against College of Charleston and a three-game
set against Purdue. They never really slowed down, although they did fall
behind Florida State in the ACC, finishing #4 in the ISR's for the year
and making a serious post-season run to finish 3rd in Omaha.

#4. Stanford, 1998. This team was so far ahead of the pack early
in the season that when I first starting playing with the ISR's in
mid-April of 1998 I was afraid that they were flawed because nobody could
be that much better than the field -- by the ten-game mark they had already
taken out Fullerton and Texas. Unfortunately, a bad weekend at home
(against absurdly good competition -- if you think the four-game Western
regionals are tough, try to remember what they were like expanded to six
teams) ended their season at the regional level. They still ended the
season at #2 in the ISR's.

#3. Rice, 2002. A year before their title run, Rice played what's
probably the toughest first ten game opening on this list and went 9-1.
Their schedule was notable for mostly consisting of three big tournaments;
against a loss to Texas A&M were stacked wins over Baylor, Texas Tech,
Houston, Wake Forest, Nebraska, New Mexico, Lamar, Louisiana-Lafayette, and
South Florida. The team finished #5 in the ISR's and were one wild play at
third base away from making serious noise in Omaha.

#2. Cal State Fullerton, 2003. The Titans started last year with
a bang that lasted considerably longer than the first ten; at that point,
they had swept Stanford and Fresno State, taken two of three from a fairly
good UNLV team and won their first against Nevada. They went on to end
up at #3 but were indistinguishable in quality from the two teams that
finished ahead of them in the ISR's and in Omaha.

So far, all these teams have at least two things in common: They didn't
win it all in Omaha, and they could have without much in the way of breaks
or luck. That brings us to ...

#1. North Carolina, 2000. North Carolina started the season 21-0
in 2000, and the first ten games included wins over UCF, Rice, Miami, and
ECU and a sweep over UCLA. Then they were swept by Georgia Tech and
became a fairly average team for the rest of the season, ending up losing
two to Penn State in a truly weak regional field. The first third of the
season kept them up at #13 in the ISR's for the year, but they weren't a
CWS contender after about mid-April.

Longer Starts

I won't go into as much depth on these, but here are the lists for fifteen
and twenty games for comparison:

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher
usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a
standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel
free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you.
This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have
caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches
or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if
I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.